Laurel Ptak

Laurel Ptak is an artist, curator and researcher based in New York City. She currently teaches in Parson's Art, Media and Technology Department at The New School and serves as at-large Associate Curator for Tensta Konsthall in Stockholm. The book, Undoing Property, which she co-edited with artist Marysia Lewandowska was published by Sternberg Press in 2013. Since 2006 her practice has often explored media and technology—especially in relationship to difficult social and political questions that it poses. During her Eyebeam fellowship Ptak will extensively research the history of cyberfeminism—looking in particular at its artistic practices since the early 1990s.

This is a series of conversations between Eyebeam residents and fellows exploring how art and new tools can interrogate one another but also converge in creative exploration.
The third and final talk in this series features Eyebeam alumni McKenzie Wark and Laurel Ptak in conversation on digital labor. For many technology has eroded any clear distinction between life and work today. From Wark's suggestion that we might update the 1950s and 60s "never work!" ethos of the Letterist and Situationist International to include "never play!" to Ptak's echoing of the 1970s feminist activist campaign Wages For Housework as a recent cry for Wages For Facebook.

Wages For Facebook draws upon ideas from a 1970s feminist activist campaign as means to think through and challenge relationships of capitalism, class and affective labor at stake within social media today.
In the 70s Wages For Housework demanded that the state pay women for their unwaged housework and caregiving, as the market economy was built upon massive amounts of this unacknowledged work—and its laborers could be seen to constitute a huge working class entirely overlooked by existing Marxist or socialist critiques. Wages for Housework built upon discourse from the anticolonial movement in order to extend the analysis of unwaged labor from the factory to the home. Along these lines Wages For Facebook attempts to draw upon feminist discourse to extend the discussion of unwaged labor to new forms of value creation and exploitation online.

In conjunction with Eyebeam’s 2014 Annual Showcase.
Join us in New York City for an all day communal updating of Wikipedia entries on subjects related to contemporary art and feminism. We will provide tutorials for the beginner Wikipedian, reference materials, childcare and refreshments. Bring your laptop, powercord and ideas for entries that need updating or creation. For the editing-averse, we urge you to stop by to show your support.
With 30+ satellite edit-a-thons also happening internationally, including: